Matthew Vaughn
Matthew Vaughn is a director, born 1971.
Matthew Vaughn was born in London in 1971 and got into film as a producer, backing Guy Ritchie's Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels in 1998 and Snatch in 2000. He moved to directing with Layer Cake (2004), which is the same London crime world handled with considerably more patience and a much better sense of how quiet a threat can be.
His actual specialty took another six years to appear. Vaughn makes films that take a genre which has become respectable and make it rude again. Kick-Ass (2010) did it to the superhero movie at the exact moment the superhero movie became the industry's main product. Kingsman: The Secret Service did it to the gentleman spy. The method is consistent: a straight-faced setup, an escalating gag, then a long unbroken take of extreme violence choreographed to a pop record and played as comedy. When it lands, as in the first Kingsman, nothing else in mainstream action cinema feels that unrestrained. He also directed X-Men: First Class (2011), the best-liked film in that franchise and the least like the rest of his work.
The trouble is that the formula is now the whole product. Kingsman: The Golden Circle, The King's Man and Argylle repeat the structure with the surprise removed, each more laborious than the last. Stardust (2007), his one unguarded and sincere film, sits outside all of it and is better than its reputation. He co-created the Kingsman comics, holds a Hugo Award, and has been knighted.
Movies (9)
Where to start with Matthew Vaughn
Layer Cake is where to begin, and not only because it came first. It is his most controlled film, a crime picture that gets its tension from people being polite to each other, and it carries none of the tics that later became his signature.
Then Kingsman: The Secret Service, the purest version of what he actually does: a tailoring-and-manners spy comedy that erupts into one sustained piece of choreographed carnage set to a rock record. Whether you love or hate that sequence will tell you whether the rest of his filmography is for you.
Kick-Ass is the other one that matters, funnier and nastier than the studio superhero films it was reacting against. Stardust is the outlier, warm and slightly shapeless, and the only film of his with no irony in it.
Approach the rest with lowered expectations. Kingsman: The Golden Circle is bloated, The King's Man is a prequel nobody asked for with one genuinely good sequence, and Argylle is where the formula collapses.